The recently-announced passenger fee to be paid by travellers from Anguilla to Dutch St. Maarten through the Anguilla-St Maarten ferry terminal at Simpson Bay, has met with opposition from the Anguilla Hotel and Tourism Association.
The fee, US$5.00 or EC$13.00, was announced on Monday, December 30, 2013, by the Government of Anguilla in conjunction with the Anguilla Tourist Board. The fee, which is in addition to the regular departure tax, was said to have been necessary to offset the operational costs of the Anguilla-St Maarten dock. The facility was built by the Anguilla Government at a cost of some one million EC dollars.
Following is the text of a press release issued on Monday this week, January 6, by the Anguilla Hotel and Tourism Association:
President of the Anguilla Hotel and Tourism Association (AHTA), Mr. Delroy Lake, indicated that he wishes to state without reservation, that the Board of Directors and the membership of the AHTA are not in agreement, nor in support of the recently imposed five United States Dollar additional passenger tax recently imposed on travellers by the Anguilla Tourist Board and the Ministry of Tourism.
Mr. Lake said that the association feels blind-sided, as this implemented measure was not put up for open discussion with the island’s association of tourism private sector stakeholders. This is especially surprising to the AHTA, as the AHTA and the ATB, have pledged to work in even closer partnership over the past few years for the island’s best interest.
At the very least, a meeting should have been held on this matter to advise the sector in advance of the introduction of the tax with a time period of at least two weeks so that the accommodation sector could have advised their guests. Sadly, the press release of this new tax was sent to the AHTA on the same day as the tax was scheduled to go into effect. This is in poor taste and does not reflect well on the industry or the island. Additionally, guests have already been complaining that the collection of this tax is causing bottlenecks and delays in the processing of passengers.
This tourism industry, our guests and our business community simply CANNOT SUSTAIN ANY MORE TAXES. We are simply killing the goose that we expect to continue to lay the Golden Egg.
Mr. Lake called on the Government of Anguilla and the Anguilla Tourist Board, to join forces with their strategic partners the AHTA and the Anguilla Chamber of Commerce to regularly come to the table and seek joint feasible solutions to some of these financial challenges as opposed to implementing ill-informed, poorly timed and presented taxes.
Anguilla has moved from an island that was perceived to be a low tax haven, to reportedly being the second highest taxed country in the Caribbean per capita. We simply do not have the funds to sustain any more taxes and keep our businesses open! We have taxed our hotel sector to death. We have taxed our communities and businesses to death. When we tax our guests, we tax the sector indirectly! What next?
While we are happy to say that we had a great Festive season, this is just a few days out of our tourism year. To coin the term from Ms. Melinda Goddard’s “Anguilla 44”, we must strive for and be able to sustain 44 weeks of robust occupancy to be able to say that we are successful. Day trippers are part of the tourism pie and we appreciate their patronage, but we must find a way to put “heads in beds” on a consistent basis, and until we do this we need to understand that the industry is still in crisis. Annually, our industry averages between 30% and 40% occupancy per year depending on the segment of accommodation. This is lower than almost all of our regional counterparts. If this statistic is not a serious red flag, what else are we waiting to see?
Penalizing our guests with additional taxes as a means to fix our access issues is counterproductive. We must remember that they have many exciting and value-added destination options – they do not have to come to Anguilla. We have to step up our efforts to facilitate their access to our island, both in terms of convenience and cost.
To quote regional Tourism Luminary Mr. Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, who was recently the guest speaker at the 2013 Annual General Membership Meeting of the AHTA, “ …visitors vote with their dollar and if we continue to impose these taxes on the industry, I am afraid we will lose the election”.
This industry is our lifeline and we must brainstorm and collaborate to come up with the best solutions to invest in and take care of our industry in a sustainable manner so that it can continue to move Anguilla forward.
(The press release is published without any editing by The Anguillian newspaper.)
